Odessa Again (11 page)

They waved at each other and smiled as Oliver and Odessa walked into the house.

Odessa thought about that smile upstairs in her room. The way her parents almost hugged. How proud Dad seemed of Mom for getting that job at JK Design Studio.

She sat down and opened her new dictionary. When the world confounded her, words brought her peace. She read some of the words Jennifer had underlined in purple.

She liked the ones that meant something other than what you’d think.

Gumshoe:
a detective. NOT a person who has gum on his shoes.

And she liked the ones with meanings that matched the way they sounded.

Enigma:
something that is not easily explained or understood.

*

Mrs. Grisham started watching them the following Monday. Odessa and Oliver arrived home to the smell of something delicious that turned out to be made of something not delicious at all. Zucchini bread.

Odessa knew few things with the sort of certainty that she knew zucchini does not belong in an after-school snack.

Oliver took one look at it and went straight to his room.

Odessa and Mrs. Grisham sat in the living room and talked, and it felt like those afternoons at Mrs. Grisham’s house, except that they weren’t surrounded by owl figurines, but by photographs of a family that didn’t include Dad.

Later that week, the snack was pumpkin muffins. An improvement for sure, but still missing the mark.

Odessa ate a muffin and polished off a glass of cold milk. Mrs. Grisham asked about her day, and she said it was fine. It was easier than telling her she saw Sadie Howell talking to Theo Summers at recess and that this wasn’t good at all because everyone knew that Sadie, with her pale blue eyes, was the prettiest girl in the whole fourth grade.

Mrs. Grisham was a friend, but Odessa didn’t need to tell her
everything
.

On her way upstairs to call Sofia, which she still did despite the “Odessa liked it shaggy” comment, she paused outside Oliver’s door. She could hear him talking quietly on the phone. Didn’t he know that she used the phone every day after snack?

She put her ear to his door. Even though she hated when he eavesdropped, she had to listen.

Who was he speaking to?

He’d said he had no friends, but this couldn’t be true. Everyone has some kind of a friend, even shy kids like Oliver.

“It’s okay,” he was saying. “You’re going to be okay. I know you feel bad, but I’m here. I’ll help.”

Odessa creaked open the door.

“Oliver?”

He sat on the floor with his back to her, holding something in his lap.

“It’s Mud,” Oliver said. “He’s really sick.”

Odessa sat down next him and watched as he stroked his hamster. His best friend.

“His heart is beating really fast and his breathing sounds weird.”

“Maybe you need to take him to the vet. Let’s go tell Mrs. Grisham.”

“No,” Oliver blurted out. “No way.”

Odessa looked at him.

“Remember Truman?” he asked.

Truman was their old cat. Mom had him since before she’d met Dad. They’d taken him to the vet one day because he wasn’t eating his kitty food, and he never came home again. Oliver was barely old enough to remember Truman, but he’d since been terrified of vets. And people doctors too.

“But maybe the vet can help him.” Odessa touched Mud gently.

Oliver shook his head no as a tear made its way down his cheek. Usually, Oliver’s tears irritated Odessa. He knew how to cry at just the right time, in just the right way, so that he always looked like an innocent victim.

Poor
Oliver,
she thought.

Usually, when someone said, “
Poor
Oliver,”
it was immediately followed by
“You’re older, Odessa. You should know better.”

But today she really felt those words:
Poor
Oliver.
The realness of that tear made Odessa want to help him.

“Wait here.” Odessa went into Mom’s medicine cabinet and took out the grape-flavored chewable Motrin. Mom gave it to her in the middle of the night when she woke up with the feeling like her knees were on fire, or sometimes her ankles, and occasionally her feet. The doctor called these “growing pains,” but Odessa was never any taller in the morning.

She also took chewable grape Motrin when she had a fever or her teeth hurt and that time she’d stepped on a bee when she’d gone outside in bare feet right after Mom had said, “Put some shoes on, you could step on a bee!”

Odessa knew Mom’s medicine cabinet was off-limits. She knew never to take any medicine all by herself, without adult supervision—that was why medicine came in bottles most adults had trouble opening. But chewable grape Motrin came in a box, and anyway, giving it to a hamster was different from taking it herself.

Odessa held the purple pill in her hand. She braced for the feeling of Mud’s nose and whiskers on her palm, but he had no interest in her offering.

“Maybe we should crush it up and put it in his food,” Odessa suggested.

Oliver shook his head. “He’s not eating.”

When Truman needed medicine Mom would pry his mouth open, shove the pill down his throat, and hold his jaws closed until he swallowed it.

She looked at the pill and at Mud’s mouth. The pill was almost half the size of his little face. She couldn’t see how this could possibly work.

“Maybe put it into his water,” Oliver said.

Odessa nodded. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, he did have brilliant ideas.

Oliver crushed the pill into the top of Mud’s water bottle and gave it a good shake, then put it back on the side of the cage. He placed Mud in a patch of sawdust just under the small metal spout.

He sniffed it.

His whiskers twitched.

He sniffed it again.

Then Mud stuck out his tongue—so little and pink—and started to drink. Odessa couldn’t believe how small his tongue was. And his teeth! No bigger than grains of rice. She had to admit, he was sort of cute as he stood on his hind legs and held on to the drinking spout with his tiny little paws.

Oliver breathed a sigh of relief as a third of the purplish water slowly drained from the bottle.

He looked at his sister. “Thanks,” he said.

Odessa smiled.

She went up to her attic, her chest swelling with pride. It felt good to help someone, even if that someone was a rodent who belonged to a toad.

She called Sofia, but Sofia’s mom said she was doing homework and that they could talk about
Dreamonica
later. Odessa didn’t say:
I
need
to
talk
about
Sadie
and
why
she’s all over Theo, not my fake mansion with the waterslide!

She sat at her desk and pulled out her folder. Perplexors: math problems disguised as word problems. They made her brain hurt. She put those back and took out her word-study sheet. The quiz, as always, was on Wednesday. Tomorrow. She looked over her list.

neighbor

brought

tongue

height

weird

believe

And her favorite:
misspell

It was nice to know that Mr. Rausche had a sense of humor.

Odessa stretched out her legs and caught the cord of her desk lamp with her sneaker, pulling the plug clear out of its socket and plunging her room into almost-blackness. That was one thing about living in the attic that Odessa did not love—her small window didn’t let in much light.

She grabbed her pen that was also a flashlight and crawled underneath her desk. Her father had given her this penlight. It said Clark Funds on it. She’d always wondered why Dad had given her Mr. Funds’s pen, but now she was glad he did, because she’d have had a hard time finding the socket without it.

Just as she went to put the plug in, Odessa spied a little door. Well, maybe it wasn’t a door, because it had no handle, but it was a small square framed space, just big enough for somebody to crawl through.

She shined the light of Mr. Funds’s pen on it.

How
peculiar,
Odessa thought.

She reached over to give the door a shove, and just as she did, she heard a bloodcurdling scream come from beneath her.

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

Odessa scrambled out from under her desk and down her attic steps and threw open Oliver’s door to find him lying in his bed, curled around Mud’s lifeless small body.

“He’s not breathing,” Oliver wailed.

Mrs. Grisham raced in. She took the hamster from Oliver and looked him over carefully. She put him up to her ear as if he were a telephone.

“Oh dear,” she said.

Oliver began to sob uncontrollably.

What came tumbling into Odessa’s mind just at that moment was a purple word from her new dictionary.

Slipshod
.

It referred to something done in a sloppy way with poor attention to detail, and though Odessa understood it to apply mostly to the way things are built or constructed, she couldn’t help but feel, at that moment, that
slipshod
might also describe her whole
feed-the-sick-hamster-some-chewable-grape-Motrin
plan.

Would it have been such a bad idea to read the label?

“It’s her fault,” Oliver cried. “It’s all her fault.”

Mrs. Grisham looked at Odessa.

“W-w-well,” Odessa stammered, “I …”

Then she ran from the room.

*

Ten hours earlier found Odessa standing on the sidewalk waiting for the bus to school. Oliver was saying something to her, but Odessa wasn’t listening. She probably didn’t listen the first time he’d said it either, but she wasn’t listening this time around because she was waiting for Mom’s car to turn the corner.

She was going to save Mud, even though Oliver had been so quick to tattle on her. It didn’t seem fair to punish a poor hamster for her brother’s being a toad.

To think she’d felt guilty about that one-hundred-dollar bill! Oliver didn’t deserve good luck. It was no wonder the kid had no friends. Who tattles on someone for doing what she thought was the right thing? For trying to be a decent sister?

He babbled on and Odessa put her hands over her ears. No reason to be nice to him.